Born in Taipei, Taiwan in 1978, TSENG Yu-Chin graduated from the Department of Communications Design at Shih Chien University in 2002 and received his master’s degree from the Graduate School of Art and Technology at Taipei National University of the Arts in 2007. He has been teaching the Department of Communications Design at Shih Chien University as a lecture since 2007. In 2004, Tseng won Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s Taipei Arts Award with the work Who Is Listening?. His works Reflection and Projection at That Times and I Hate Assumption have been displayed in Co2 Taiwan Avant-Grade Document and Co4 Taiwan Avant-Grade Document respectively. He has been invited to Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale in 2005 and Kassel Documenta in 2007, where he was the youngest participating artist in that year and the first Taiwanese artist there. 

Tseng created Fever Dark in his artist’s residency at Location One in New York in 2008. Since 2008, his video works have featured a painting-like quality as it uses sound to create pulse-like rhythm. He is particularly known for his depiction of the subtle but yet dynamic emotional experiences and the strong existence of body in a space. In 2011, Tseng visualized the chaotic, unresting, angry, and puzzled adolescenthood in his Confession. His later works such as Shivering Wall, Chaotic Summer, and Panting all focus on the truthful representation of physical emotions and experiences as the main artistic expression. 

There are five works in Who is Listening? series, while the five videos are based on the artist’s daily life. Some is about a simple thought, some is about a childhood memory or the memory of the family, while some is about a relationship. The videos in the series are as straightforward and simple as the artist’s insistence on instinct and sensual experiences. In Tseng’s artistic practice, children represent innocence while the milky white yogurt is labelled as another symbol imposed on the child. How will the symbol be interpreted? The language itself reflects viewers’ hidden desire and perspective. Once the interpretation is decided, the image is no longer innocent. 

Tseng’s works mostly focus on our sensual experiences as well as the existence of body for that what he attempts to confront is the society suppressing our emotional expression in various ways. It has been a long time that our society, under the influence of Confucian belief, treated sex/desire/emotion as tattoo and avoided the most primitive urge inside our bodies. The body’s instinct has always been defined as immature, disordered, degenerate, and corrupted. 

In Tseng’s symbolic and yet emotional works, images of children and teenagers reveal the invisible violence on the innocent figures. The form of the violence comes from the suppression encouraged by the society’s collective consciousness. Particularly in the making of Fever Dark and Shivering Wall, the artist transforms the overwhelming suppression, which the whole space is stuffed with, into a unique visual language. The body trapped inside the visual space has no exit to get away but to prove its own existence in its raging, excited, and shivering gasping.